5.7 State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture – FAO
The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014
20
The overall growth in aquaculture production remains relatively strong owing to the increasing demand for food fish among most producing countries. However,
aquaculture output by some industrialized regional major producers, most notably the United States of America, Spain, France, Italy, Japan and the Republic of Korea, has
fallen in recent years. A decline in finfish production is common to all these countries, while mollusc production has also decreased in some of them. The availability of
fish imported from other countries where production costs are relatively low is seen as a major reason for such production falls. The resulting fish supply gap in
the aforementioned countries has been one of the drivers encouraging production expansion in other countries with a strong focus on export-oriented species.
World food fish aquaculture production expanded at an average annual rate of 6.2 percent in the period 2000–2012, more slowly than in the periods 1980–1990
10.8 percent and 1990–2000 9.5 percent. Between 1980 and 2012, world aquaculture production volume increased at an average rate of 8.6 percent per year. World food
fish aquaculture production more than doubled from 32.4 million tonnes in 2000 to 66.6 million tonnes in 2012.
Table 6 Aquaculture production by region: quantity and percentage of world total production
Selected groups and countries
1990 1995
2000 2005
2010 2012
Africa
tonnes
81 015 110 292
399 688 646 182
1 286 591 1 485 367
percentage